Sweet Potato Caramel Mud Cake

I had some friends over for lunch today and thought I would trial this cake for the boys 1st birthday coming up in a few weeks.

Sweet Potato Caramel Mudcake with Popcorn Toffee Shards

The cake has cooked pureed sweet potato within it. I was abit hesitant, as when I make cakes I prefer to not worry about being too health conscious! But this was amazing! If no one told you the ingredients, you would never guess it, as it has such a strong caramel taste and dense mud cake texture. The white ganache in the recipe accompanies it really well.

As I like to ‘bling’ up my cakes, I thought that my latest torched meringue would be too sweet with the white chocolate ganache, so thought I would make toffee as the amber colour would go well with the sweet potato/caramel colours.

To further tone down the sweetness, I popped some microwave popcorn I had in the pantry, and poured the toffee over it to set. The saltiness of the popcorn really offsets the sweetness of the toffee, mudcake and white chocolate ganache. Once the toffee was set, I broke it into shards and stuck it into the cake with the larger sizes to the back of the cake and placed smaller shards and popcorn pieces to fountain down the side of the cake. It stuck really well onto the white chocolate ganache.

I like to make toffee the old fashioned way on the stove top, 1 cup of caster sugar: 1/4 cup water in a stainless steel pot (so you can clearly see the sugar caramelise) on medium heat. Don’t stir at all, and just swirl around the contents in the pan as it bubbles and slowly turns into an amber colour. Toffee is such an easy and effective way to decorate cakes and desserts!

If you’re wanting to try something different (with ‘safe’ flavours for those fussy eaters), I would recommend giving this a go!